Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [351]
He bowed at the doors, and when they were closed, stood until Catherine d’Albon joined him. ‘You are leaving,’ she said.
She had not changed, except perhaps in a firming of the contours of her face, and a little exaggeration in her colouring which had not been there before.
Lymond said, ‘I am riding to Dieppe with my brother. We should be there on Tuesday.’
‘You should take longer,’ she said, ‘They say you have been gravely ill. I can see it.’
‘We go slowly,’ said Lymond. He did not avoid her eyes. ‘If I had come to you that night in the Hôtel d’Hercule, none of this would have happened.’
‘One thinks these things,’ Catherine said. ‘If you had not spoken harshly to your mother, Madame de Sevigny would not have gone to your room. If you had not wanted a divorce, you would not have stayed in France.… Why did you accept your marriage in the end, and then break it? They say you are fickle.’
‘And you are not. You withdrew because of Philippa, am I not right? Then you might like to know that if you made a sacrifice, it was not in vain.’
‘Then you are going to join her?’ Catherine said.
‘No,’ Lymond said. ‘I don’t expect to see her again. But I shall never marry again, nor I think will she. I hope you will find one day what we had. Even if it lasts only an hour, it is worth it.’
‘I am glad then,’ said Catherine, ‘that there was nothing between us, rather than mediocrity.’
And from the homes … of Unicornes …
‘There was kindness,’ he said. ‘And that was a great deal.’ Then he kissed her hand and left, to find his brother.
*
The journey to Dieppe, as he had said, was slow, because he was not strong. He did not speak much as they travelled and in the evenings he retired early to his tavern room, although this was difficult, as everywhere they went he was recognized. He wrote, Richard saw, a great many letters, some of them to familiar addresses: to Lord Grey at Onzain; to Nicholas Applegarth at Sevigny. To Gravelines, on behalf of a man called Harry Palmer, who had died. Nearly every day, also, there was a call to make, or several, upon friends on the way. For a total of many years now, one realized, France had been Lymond’s home.
And the weather was kindly on this last journey north: the trees hardly tinged yet with russet, and meadowsweet and white columbine in the meadows where sun-gilded cattle grazed.
In place of the bitter wildness of winter, the mellow ripeness of autumn moved past them. In the townships there were full blown roses still, and vines on the trellis, and white geese, and sunflowers, and the pallid blue velvet of cabbages. Ploughed fields, and slender stemmed trees with their leaves embroidered sharp on the skyline. The latticed pattern of wood stacks, and the slow stride and swift trot of water. Crows, and hay barns, and a bank of bracken like chiffon against the low sun. A farm with a dovecote, and hens and dogs and hives and sheets on a line; the weeping arrows of willows. An orchard of apples, jade as the rose window of the Sainte Chapelle, past which he had escaped on his way to the Hôtel des Sphères.
The pretty house in the rue de la Cerisaye, now quite gone. The empty, ruined old house in Lyon. The graves of two old women; and a strong and vigorous man; and an old and vicious one. A sister lost, a lover lost, an escutcheon taken from him, and two nations he had made temporarily his own. And Philippa.
At Dieppe, the captain at the gate greeted them, and Richard, his attention attracted at last by the sheer exhaustion in his brother’s face, was reminded of the last time Francis must have made this identical journey, and wondered if he remembered it.
M. de Fors was still in Scotland, so they were received in his absence by one of his lieutenants, who gave them a bed for the night, and next day saw that their luggage, their servants and their horses were safely loaded on the Réal. Richard stayed on deck to watch the steep white-pleated cliffs sink into the sea, but Francis had gone below, and did not return.
Richard left him alone. By her own curious